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Originally Posted by Slava
I'm not going to lie to you: I had to google "refoulement". It looks like that applies to a refugee? If people are circumventing immigration laws and the like are the in the same class and deserve the same treatment?
Isn't the best place to prosecute a war criminal the Hague?
Clearly you know more about this then I do, but it just seems like that is where all the war criminals end up, so it should follow that these guys would suffer the same fate. Access to a fair trial, no torture on the way to that fair trial and thats that?
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Yeah, the laws apply to a refugee. Part of the problem is that the immigration laws in Canada allow for the government to turf immigrants (of which refugees are a sub-section) on a threshold of reasonable grounds to believe dishonesty in an application. So these guys, who were legitimate refugees, will be kicked out of the country and could face torture at home, or could face nothing at all at home - including not being charged with the crimes that the Canadian government seems to have reasonable belief that they were involved in. Amnesty International argued that, hey, we shouldn't just be sending them on the first flight out with no idea what will happen to them, and that Canada should either step up and put a case together and prosecute or, at the minimum, ensure that they will be dealt with appropriately upon arrival in whatever country they are being sent to. That's basically it.
As for the Hague, like I said, really the only institution of international criminal justice with a broad enough mandate to deal with war criminals not associated with conflicts in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia is at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. However, the ICC's jurisdiction is limited to only the most serious crimes of international concern under Article 5 of the Rome Statute of the ICC; it is mostly concerned with going after "the big fish". Low-level offenders won't be dealt with at the Hague, which is why domestic courts are the best place to prosecute the people in question.